Oklahoma Dreaming: A Chill in the Air
by Donna Schoenkopf
This morning I woke to the barest hint of a chill in the air.
It was a crisp feeling.
Snappy. And clean.
It’s almost noon now and not exactly cool, but it’s light and airy.
Summer heat seems to create dense air. At least here in Oklahoma. With high humidity and a beating sun the air becomes almost liquid and with sweat pouring off my body, I feel as though I am drowning.
An unpleasant death.
I had forgotten how to sweat in all the long years in California. It’s so dry there that my sweat lifted off my skin before I even felt it. So it was with great surprise, and AGONY I might add, that I felt not only beads of sweat, but GUSHERS of sweat, exuding from my old crotchety body.
SWEAT! God, the first year of experiencing it was awful. I felt as though I was dying when episodes of it would begin. It would start with a claustrophobic feeling, as though I was trapped in my skin. My whole body felt like a balloon being blown up.
And then, just when I could tolerate it no longer, my pores would open and a flood of perspiration would erupt all over me. My scalp, face, neck, arms, my torso, legs, all of me, would release my precious bodily fluids.
It felt awful.
But as I looked around at other people sweating under the sun with me, they didn’t even look bothered.
???????????
And not only THAT, everyone’s skin was beautiful. As pretty as a baby’s. Women older than I had the skin of a seven year old, all pink and pretty. No wrinkles or crustiness.
It’s from sweating. Cleans the skin, rejuvenates the skin, makes the skin happy to be alive.
Peewee would tell me to be sure to drink lots of liquids while we worked on the house during the summer. He said a person could get sunstroke in the blink of an eye or get so dehydrated they’d be in serious trouble if they didn’t drink water. During the summer he always had a cooler of cold drinks—water and Dr. Peppers were his mainstays. He always offered everyone he met a cold one.
That was nice.
I remember once trying to put up my brand new mailbox and turning beet red from the heat, humidity and exertion. It was a horrible experience. I would lean over trying to drill the damn screws into the frame, while hot, boiling blood rushed to my head, almost knocking me unconsciousness, until I just literally could not take it anymore.
I have NEVER been so hot in my life. Ever.
And when I saw my face in the mirror when I finally trudged down my driveway back to the house, and went to the bathroom to throw cold water on my face, I was shocked to see the deep maroon color of my skin in the mirror. The whites of my eyes and my teeth seemed whiter than they’d ever been before, because of how deeply red my face was.
I mean the color of a BEET. And I’m not kidding.
Somehow, through the three summers that I’ve now been back here, my body has adapted to the intensity of an Oklahoma summer.
I actually haven’t realized I’ve sweated much until I come back into the house and realize my clothes feel cold and wet because they’re drenched with sweat. My son John’s “Tomboys” baseball cap is drenched. My bra and panties are wringing wet and stuck to my body.
That’s when I hit the good old Outdoor Shower.
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
But today there is a sparkle in the air.
We have had an unusually cool and wet August, according to the folks who would know these things. One guy said our August felt more like May. And May is the prettiest month of the year here.
With the most tornadoes.
But this year tornadoes have been few and far between. A very light tornado year.
Yes. I woke up this morning and there was just the slightest hint of, I don’t know, CINNAMON, in the air. Or ginger. A sparkle.
I love that feeling. It makes me feel alive and full of energy.
I love it so much that I gave up my beloved Hawaii as a final retirement destination when I awoke every day, while I was there to scout out the place, to a temperature that never varied. Morning didn’t vary from afternoon which didn’t vary from evening which was the same as midnight.
I felt myself craving a little coolness. Not that Hawaii was achingly hot. It wasn’t. It just was completely and utterly the same.
And California is something like that. Not that there is absolutely no variance, but after all those years I’d have to say the climate is bland, dull, unremarkable.
Not Oklahoma.
Spring is fabulous. It opens like a flower, each day more beautiful than the last. Storms crash through, scaring the hell out of me. Lightning so fierce and sharp that the sky stays lit for hours on end with its nonstop fire.
Thunder so loud it shakes the sliding glass doors in their frames and booms so long that I can’t tell if it’s a tornado coming or just a really long thunderclap.
Rain so heavy it washes away roads and driveways and turns wheat fields and low-lying country into lakes of water with cows tiptoeing through it and egrets posing gracefully alongside its edges.
And then there is a slight turn in the air one morning and you realize the air is no longer light and sweet. It’s heavy and hot.
The sky is deep, deep blue.
The sun beats down, and at seven in the morning it’s already baking the clay into cement.
Summer storms smash through. (What’s Oklahoma without storms, eh?)
The pond evaporates to half its size.
I sweat.
It’s hot at night. It’s hot in the morning. And it’s as hot as being in a pot of boiling water during the day.
And then ... today comes.
There is the tiniest hint of a sparkle in the air.
The first tingle of autumn.
Everything looks the same. The grass is green and long, the trees are full of leaves, wildflowers still poke their pretty selves out of the ground. But there is something indefinably different.
Today I went out to deal with the grass growing through the deck. Poured boiling water over the green sprigs sticking through the cracks and took copious notes. Darling Don says it’s a perfect opportunity to experiment with weed killing options and that I must take copious notes.
And I wasn’t exhausted by the effort!
Well, THAT was strange.
So I unplugged my rechargeable weed whacker and walked down to the end of the gravel driveway and mowed down all the wild and crazy plant life around my solar lights and alongside the edges of the drive and the tall mass of green in the middle of the driveway that brushes the underbelly of my car when I drive home.
And I had barely broken a sweat.
So I parked my rechargeable in its little nest and picked up Nelly, my gas weed whacker, and proceeded to whack down the tall, tall grass on the incline of my hill.
And even after breaking the line THREE times, reassembling everything, and pulling the starter cord a million times, I STILL wasn’t tired.
But I didn’t want to work outside anymore and I wanted to write this column, so I parked Nelly and sat down here at my desk to write this.
All my doors are open. My fans move silently overhead, drawing in the light, balmy air. There is not a bead of sweat on my body.
It’s pretty gorgeous right now.
Soon it will be a full-blown Fall, with brown leaves and brisk air. The grass will brown up, the wildflowers will disappear. The countryside will be all brown and gray.
And then the ice storms of winter will crack and across the land.
Whoooooooeeeeeeee!
I LOVE weather.
donna@fourstory.org
Comments
I envy any place on Earth right now that has cool temperatures. The past 2 weeks in L.A. have been BOILING hot!!!! It doesn’t help that we’ve been experiencing fires in just about every direction around the city. Can’t wait til it gets cooler here too.
2009-09-01 by VioletaWonderful piece. I experience the same thing in California. Wake up one morning with no discernable change in the temperature or weather and sniff the air and, ka-boom, I know instantly that fall’s here. Or spring. Even though the plant are all the same, sky’s the same, we may be in for more frost or hot spells, but the change is there instantly. And have no idea exactly what causes that absolute knowledge. It isn’t a smell exactly, but something about the air has changed overnight. And it isn’t visible since I remember waking up one morning when I lived in L.A. and took a breath the the air coming through the window, sat up and said, Ah, it’s fall. Very strange.
2009-09-02 by Ann CalhounThe last couple weeks of August in central Wisconsin were unseasonably cool, but this week its come back up into the low 70s. The weather in San Diego varied more by how far inland you were from the coast, but where I was about 5 miles inland it was uniformly pleasant. I don’t care for three months of snow on the ground (niether to some of the people who have lived here all their lives), and no matter how many times I see it, I still identify leafless forests with places I saw after the 2003 SD fire that were burnt over. We haven’t had an ice storm yet while I’ve been here. There’s lots of ice to slip on without them.
2009-09-03 by Gary Richardbarbara: i can identify with the nostalgia of missing things like weather when you move to a new place. it’s powerful.
violeta: it must be an absolute hell right now. california has the most incredible wildfires of all. i was told the beetles have killed all the pine forests in the mountains because there hasn’t been a cold enough winter to kill them, so all those dead trees just exploded!
ann: i guess you’re far enough north to experience the tingle, eh?
gary: i will never challenge your wisconsin winter with my little oklahoma winter. i think i’d be ready for another latitude, too, if i’d had to endure what you have.
2009-09-05 by Donna SchoenkopfWhere I am just outside Oshkosh the winters seem to be less intense than to the north and south. The snowfalls have been relatively “dry” and I would really hate to undergo a real icestorm that coats and takes down powerlines and makes all surfaces slick. I’ve had a couple really scary falls on ice even as it is.
2009-09-05 by Gary RichardDonna: Yep, Los Osos is 1/2 way between L.A. and San Francisco. It’s a bit north of Point Concepcion, which is the official North/South weather and sea water-temperature break, i.e. warmer water& southern fish don’t go north of Point Conception and cold water& northern fish don’t go south, though that’s changing with global warming. We recently had a good sized great white sharks snap a seal in half off the Cambria coastline, so other southern critters are coming north after warmer water fish and seals that are also moving north with the plankton that never used to come this far north & etc. Year round, it’s always cooler than in L.A., though a couple of years ago had a freak heatwave—106 in Los Osos. Totally unexpected. Got home from work to find the plants in the back yard were . . . crispy. Very unusual, though it happened again a few days back, supposedly 100 in Los Osos. Being a reformed desert rat (like Donna, raised in Indio, near Palm Springs) I no longer “do” heat, thank you very much.
2009-09-06 by Ann Calhoun
Oh Boy, Me too!!! I miss weather sooo much
2009-09-01 by barbara